Category: Living in Society

Politics mostly social commentary.

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Living in Society

Right to Repair

Trail walking on the state park trail.

I met Murray through my part time job in high school. He went to West High School, and I went to Assumption. Today, I might call him a gear head. Maybe I called him that then.

He was building a “hot rod” at a gas station on Brady Street. When I last saw it he had stripped it down to the frame. Part-by-part he assembled it himself. He planned to use it to “ride the ones” (driving the one-way streets in downtown Davenport with other high school aged kids with cars). I don’t think he had any other real plans for his hand-made car. It seemed to be more about the process.

“Right to repair is a legal right for owners of devices and equipment to freely modify and repair products such as automobiles, electronics, and farm equipment,” according to Wikipedia. “Right to repair may also refer to the social movement of citizens putting pressure on their governments to enact laws protecting a right to repair.”

In the late sixties, we hadn’t heard the term “right to repair.” Murray assumed he could do what he wanted to get his vehicle street legal. He knew what being street legal meant. Today, manufacturers are tightening the screws on repairing vehicles, farm equipment, and electronic devices, blocking users and owners from working on their stuff. It seems anti-American… and wrong.

I don’t think denying the right to repair will stand in 21st Century America.

My maternal grandmother had no hesitation about taking apart her stove and fixing a burner. She was born in the late 1800s, and that’s what she learned growing up. When I saw her do this, the stove came with her rented apartment. A younger person might have just called the landlord.

When I studied the rural Minnesota community where my great, great grandfather settled, there were two blacksmith shops in a community of about 200 families. At a distance from major commercial centers (if such even existed in the 1800s), and with Original Equipment Manufactured parts distribution (not called that or even in existence then) a long and slow process, locals devised indigenous solutions to mechanical problems with available materials and said blacksmiths. This seems so American, so pragmatic.

No one would argue about modern day equipment, vehicles, and farm implements being more complicated than they were in the late 1800s. If a wheel fell off a wagon and broke, the owner would mend the wheel, axle, or both and start operating it again. The computer technology embedded in modern equipment was in an unforeseeable future. Likewise, computer-aided design enabled such precision that would be hard to replicate using a hammer, anvil, and heat. Where is the balance between the owner of a piece of equipment fixing it themselves and the manufacturer insisting that only they had the expertise to do so? This aspect of society is changing and to many of us, it make no sense.

I lost track of Murray when I went to university. Last time I saw him he was working at a gas station on Riverside Drive in Iowa City. Sometimes I think about what society is losing with fewer gear heads and people like my grandmother around. We changed in ways that shut the door on returning to a life where folks knew how every device in their home worked and how to fix it. It is one way our lives have gotten poorer with increased technology.

Some Friday night I’ll have to go ride the ones in my home town to see if teenagers still do. Somehow, I doubt it.

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Living in Society

On the Trail to a Selfie

December 2024 selfie.

This is the face of a man trying to understand how his Android camera works. The background on the state park trail was planned. The green sweatshirt is my standard winter uniform, although I own sweatshirts in several colors. The watch cap was a gift from a farmer friend. My unshaven face is because I’m at the end of my once every three days shaving cycle. I’m looking at the lens because that’s what I think I should be doing. As selfies go, this is graded C-minus. It reinforces my belief I am not photogenic.

As if 2024 was not bad enough, today’s Cedar Rapids Gazette reported the University of Iowa is ending the American Studies Department in anticipation of anti-diversity legislation effective next year. I graduated from the progran in 1981 when it was a loose interdisciplinary group not even formalized into a department until 2000.

One of my valued possessions is a copy of Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization with Alexander Kern’s signature inside the cover. I bought it for a buck at the library’s used book sale. I doubt Republicans behind anti-DEI knew of Kern’s early leadership in American Studies at Iowa, or of the Beards’ seminal work. I think that is the point of the anti diversity movement: public schools will only teach one version of American history, the one we legislators approve.

I’ve been around long enough to remember local folks questioning why we should build a big, fancy library in our town with population about 2,000. The money was donated, then the building was deeded to the city for one dollar. The expense of permanent staffing generated some griping. We live in a time when it is not a long distance from these attitudes rising to the surface again, and this time closing the library permanently. I hope not, but here we are.

On the positive side, this week a federal judge struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. Nevertheless, Iowa leads the nation in the number of banned books.

Let’s face it. These discussions and repression of information in public helped make 2024 a difficult year all around.

I’ll likely continue to make selfies. Once I figure out the camera, I might work on posing. For now, I’ll deal with life as it presents itself. What else are we to do?

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Living in Society

Tied to the Whipping Post

Lonny Pulkrabek and Rita Hart two days before the 2020 election in which Hart lost her race for Congress by six votes. Masks because we were in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic.

It seems urgent to figure out what to do in our politics going forward. I’d like to begin my work just after the New Year’s holiday. Disengaging from politics is not a useful option. I plan to stay with the fight and so should more of us.

It’s been almost seven weeks since the Nov. 5 election in which Iowa Democrats fared poorly. Donald Trump won the top of the ticket race against Kamala Harris, and Republicans added to their majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Republicans retained all four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Mariannette Miller-Meeks winning in the first district by 799 votes. I’ve been reading, listening, and thinking about my experience and the best I can describe Democrats current situation is we are tied to the whipping post and everyone is whaling on us.

I get it. We get it. We lost the election and as we recover from the losses, we see the state party as a visible whipping boy. The week before Christmas I drove past the office on Fleur Drive in Des Moines and even I cringed at how little the building changed since I last paid a visit. Democrats won’t win elections by repeating the same strategies and tactics we used in 2024. It seems appropriate to have a discussion about whether to blow up the Iowa Democratic Party and start over.

I like the song Whippin’ Post, which I heard the Allman Brothers Band play on Feb. 19, 1972 at the University of Iowa Field House.

Sometimes I feel, sometimes I feel,
Like I’ve been tied to the whippin’ post.
Tied to the whippin’ post, tied to the whippin’ post.
Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’.

I haven’t felt like I’m dying since the election. I attribute that to being an experienced septuagenarian with little to lose. We have the wrong expectation if we think the state party will dig us out of the hole we’ve gotten into. It is useless to whale on the state party and expect running the chair out of town on the rail will fix the problems. Further, it is plain wrong to expect the state party to lead us out of the darkness. We must find our own way.

There is a different usage for whipping post besides the place we can tie folks who don’t live up to our expectations and flog them.

John C. Leggett and Suzanne Malm described “Whipping Post” as a metaphor for a romantic relationship in which the participants masochistically stay in though it has gone bad. This definition invokes the mutuality between the leadership and members of the Iowa Democratic Party. It is aptly applied to today’s politics. We must free ourselves from the relationship and break up.

Endemic to the current party structure is a misdiagnosis of key issues in a campaign. More than anything, politics has gotten local. In Big Grove Precinct, where I live, the electorate is divided. Trump won here in 2024. During the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won over Joe Biden 671 votes to 637. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton 575 votes to 529. Barack Obama won here in both 2008 and 2012. My precinct has a divided electorate and has recently been won by both Democrats and Republicans. While new people moving to our area lean Republican, the key issue is how does an organizer build a Democratic majority at the polls, recruiting votes regardless of party? We didn’t address that in 2024. It was hard to get anyone to do normal grassroots work in my area. Both these things need our urgent attention.

Others have recently written about the First Congressional District Convention on May 5, in North Liberty. The description I wrote soon afterward hits a key point:

A speaker at the convention looked around the room and suggested the dominance of white-skinned, grey-haired delegates is the problem with the party. Whatever. Had rain not been forecast during the convention hours, I would rather have been working in our yard. The trouble, as I experienced recruiting a replacement for my position on the county central committee, is literally no one is willing to do the work to provide steady volunteer work for local Democrats. That’s a much different problem than skin tone and hair color among people willing to show up on a spring Saturday.

It also indicates that whoever is party chair will have minimal influence on how campaigns are organized. It is up to us to self-organize.

No matter how many teams of canvassers are deployed by Democratic organizations, Democrats will be frustrated. I suggest something else is at work. What drives people not to care about our governance? Where did the breakdown of top-down methods used in the past by Democrats occur? Answers to these and other questions seem more important than keeping the Iowa Democratic Party (or ourselves) tied to the whipping post.

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Living in Society

Mandate My Left Foot

Mariannette Miller-Meeks at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 13, 2010. Photo credit – Wikimedia Commons.

By the end of the holidays I need to resolve my relationship with politics for the coming years. The federal trifecta with Republicans controlling the executive and legislative branches of government was a clear win, if a somewhat marginal one. After reading many news stories and comments, and based on my experience, I am ready to move forward. In general, Democrats are still licking their wounds, yet life is too short to dawdle in the arena. First, the situation, then what I plan to do in my next post.

Let’s start with President Trump. He is a lame duck going into his second term with about a year and a half to get anything big done. (Obama was hobbled after the 2010 midterms). This time the president-elect has a shadow administration comprised of the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 to support him. He also has a number of billionaire buddies he hopes to install in his cabinet and other key governmental positions. Don’t forget his side kick, the richest man in the world, who is willing to spend untold sums of money to get his way. These things can be counted among Trump’s assets.

Out of the box, Trump seems particularly weak. Partly this is his own doing, yet the evidence is more visible with each passing week.

The man is apparently governing via social media. Few people I know pay much attention to social media whether it be Truth Social, X, BlueSky, Threads, Instagram or Facebook. It is his decision how to govern and conduct routine press relations. A more effective way to do this would be to enable his press secretary Karoline Leavitt to play a larger role by releasing his appointments, policy announcements, and general news, thus creating a buffer to moderate his bad stuff before releasing it. As he is doing it, the message is off the cuff, and haphazard. Ultimately we can’t believe anything he says, but we knew that from the first term.

Some Republicans, including the president-elect, have been kicking around the word “mandate” after the November election. Enough dust has not been raised to obscure the fact President Trump barely won the election. The Republican majority in the House is super thin (5 members), and the 53-47 majority in the Senate is not filibuster-proof. In the Senate, it is not clear the aging cohort of octogenarian Republicans will cave to his every wish. It will be a rough road ahead for the president to accomplish much during the 119th Congress, if they are even capable of getting all the Republican legislators behind him on any legislation.

Trump is losing initial skirmishes. John Thune beat his choice of Rick Scott for Senate Majority Leader. The Senate wanted no part of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. His side kick Elon Musk got out ahead of him in the public debate over keeping the government funded. Trump didn’t respond to Musk for hours. After he did, his demand that a suspension of the debt ceiling be included in the CR was ignored. All of these things point to a weak second term as president.

Despite this impressive ledger of liabilities, his minions, like Mariannette Miller-Meeks, continue to parrot his talking points about a mandate, to wit: “November 5th, 2024 is a day that will forever be remembered as the day the American people voted for a mandate—a mandate for change.”

There was no mandate, Trump barely got a plurality. Unlike his economic policy, I predict this weakness will trickle down throughout Republican governance. Stay tuned for what’s next for my advocacy in the next post.

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Living in Society

Photo Gallery 2024

Here are twelve photos that are among the best I took this year. Click on the upper left image to open the slide show. Hope you enjoy!

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Reviews

Book Review: Citizen

Each end of year holiday season I find a book by or about one of our presidents and read it as a gift to myself. Since that slugabed Barack Obama hasn’t published his second book of presidential memoirs (volume one was published in 2020), I settled for Bill Clinton’s post-presidency memoir Citizen: My Life After the White House published Nov. 19 this year. There are plenty of reasons to read Clinton.

My position about Bill Clinton and this book is that since he survived heart disease and a case of sepsis he ought to write a post-presidency memoir so historians can benefit from the information gathered herein. Indeed, there is granular information about the accomplishments of the Clinton Foundation. The first two parts of the book cover those years in detail lest we forget Bill and Hillary Clinton were do-gooders, all over the world. Let’s face it, though. Bill Clinton is a political animal and the third part of the book, “Politics, Rewriting History, and Reviving the Foundation in a Still Uncertain Future,” in which he discusses politics, is what many were waiting to hear.

Clinton points to Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America as the source of today’s divisiveness in society. When Republicans won the 1994 midterm elections and installed Gingrich as Speaker of the House, it was he who changed our politics to be more confrontational. From shutting down the government twice, to welfare reform, to a capital gains tax cut, to impeaching Bill Clinton as president, Gingrich made it so our politics would never be the same as it was. We are still suffering from the conservative detritus in his wake in national politics. He supported Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Important in Citizen is Bill Clinton’s account of Hillary Clinton’s political life through her run for the presidency in 2016. While their story is familiar, he makes a strong case for what happened and why. It is a story infrequently told in major media outlets and worth reading here.

Clinton also reviews some of his major accomplishments, like the Crime Bill and the Family and Medical Leave Act. There is no shortage of moments when he honked his own horn about his many accomplishments as president, including job creation, converting the budget deficit into a budget surplus, and connecting more schools to the internet. Clinton makes a solid case that his administration did many things that benefited middle-income workers.

Beginning around 2016, Clinton received criticism from the left that his signing the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 welfare reform bill were actually him (and Congress) caving to the far right. He defends himself rationally as the “explainer in chief” is wont to do. It is important to recall that in the end, Clinton was one of the good guys among politicians and advanced Democratic causes.

I recommend reading Citizen: My Life after the White House by Bill Clinton. It is important to know the history of Democratic politics and Clinton was in the middle of it.

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Living in Society

Colfax Casey’s

Home brewing a cup of coffee while traveling.

Coffee is $2.02 per 16 ounce cup at the Casey’s in Colfax. I stopped there enroute home after an overnight visit to my spouse and her sister. I made many trips to Des Moines this year, and almost always stop in Colfax to see what’s going on at the convenience store. That usually means seeing what new employees greet me, as employee turnover appears to be constant. This Casey’s is an easy off and on the interstate and I usually purchase a lottery ticket, gasoline, and a beverage or snack. The sameness of the offering is comforting.

I started the day with a Keurig cup of coffee at my sister-in-law’s home. I forgot my bottle of instant espresso, which I prefer when I can’t make my own coffee in my own machine. I am an early riser and foraging in the kitchen is better than leaving the house in search of a cup. The Keurig cup served during the hours before the others awoke and got out of bed.

I have been spending so many nights in Des Moines, I bought a 28-inch wide camp cot with 600 pound capacity. I brought pillows, sheets, and a blanket from home, and borrowed a feather blanket from my sister-in-law for added cushioning. It is not the best, yet it is sufficient. Once the transition in Des Moines is finished, we’ll have the cot for overnight guests at home.

My travel from home to Des Moines is in four segments. Leaving home, I cross Lake Macbride and the Coralville Reservoir to access Penn Street which leads to Interstate 380. I take 380 South to the large intersection with Interstate 80, then exit West on 80. There is a long, mostly straight stretch of 80 that leads to the outskirts of Des Moines where Colfax is found. From Colfax, the congestion begins and the highway expands the number of lanes. I follow 80 to Interstate 235 to the exit for the state capitol, then it’s a multi-mile journey to my destination. I have the route memorized. That long stretch of Interstate 80 drives quickly.

If I have no extra chores while in Des Moines, my tank holds enough fuel to make the round trip without stopping. Usually there is something extra, and then Colfax is my go-to fuel stop. Coming from Des Moines, arriving in Colfax is a release of the tensions of congested traffic. On this week’s trip, truck traffic was heavy all the way, which again built tension after resting in Colfax. I made it home safely.

We need places like Colfax. Without these trips, I would not have considered the place important. Just another stop on the interstate highway. Yet our mind needs patterns and in cases like this we create our own. Gasoline, coffee and lottery tickets are available all along the interstate highways. That I pick Colfax for my stops is a bit of creativity I own and enjoy. I look forward to stopping at the Colfax Casey’s.

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Living in Society

Social Media Into 2025

Photo by Buro Millennial on Pexels.com

It’s no secret I use a mobile device. I recently discovered a metric in settings called Digital Wellbeing which tallies the number of minutes of screen time on my device. I was shocked to see I averaged 5 hours, 50 minutes of screen time per day during the previous seven days. Just by being aware of my time I reduced it from 6 hours, 30 minutes on Friday to 4 hours, 29 minutes on Saturday. I need a more organized approach to reduce screen time.

Eschewing social media completely is not a good option. I rely upon the interactions with “friends” and “followers” and the relationships they have grown into. On Threads, these are mostly people I know only through the platform. On BlueSky, these are people I know in person or others I followed during my long time on X (2007- 2023). Threads is about art, photography, and sharing each others’ work. BlueSky is about staying tuned to whatever we call the national discussion inside a liberal bubble. Facebook is still there, although I am paring that group down to people with whom I have a tangible, in-person link. In most cases, I know Facebook friends from personal interaction. I have a couple of active friends on Instagram, but mostly I view posts by people I don’t know. I also view short videos there, something I hadn’t intended yet takes a lot of my screen time today. These four programs represent the as-is situation with social media.

Six hours of screen time in a day is not acceptable. While the entertainment value it provides is already baked into our monthly budget, the cost is in how my brain accommodates the input. Without completely understanding it, I know it has a deleterious effect. That is reason enough to cut back.

Killing time is not an interest of mine. So what am I seeking from screen time? I’ll just make a list:

On Threads, I curated a feed that informs me about what our small community is doing. Mostly, we share photos of cups of coffee, and daily, regular posts which are habit forming. One person showcases a different pair of socks each day. I see photographs, works of art, and short posts about how the day is starting across multiple time zones. When I wake, the Australian and New Zealand accounts are already on morning of the next day. While I’m doing this, I make my own daily post with the outdoors ambient temperature, time, a brief composition, and a photo of my coffee cup. I drink coffee while scrolling to see what followers are doing today. We all have morning routines, and this is mine. I return for updates a couple of times each morning and afternoon. By 6 p.m. I shut my mobile device off for the day.

After the November election there was a movement of people from X to BlueSky. A lot of the folks I followed on X made the transition. Some I followed on Threads decided BlueSky was a better platform. In any case, I’m there and posting a couple of times each day. It has been easy to regulate how much time I spend there because I am less interested in any “national discussion.” Threads is my go-to.

My sights are set on reducing time on Instagram. The number of accounts I follow there is small and only a handful post regularly. It has become a site with two main functions: automatically cross post photos I upload to Facebook, and following a few accounts that offer something unique. If I reduce screen time, the largest initial share of cuts will come from Instagram. I went into settings and set a timer to notify me when I spend 90 minutes in a day on Instagram. We’ll see how that goes.

Facebook used to be great, but now it has been reduced the way a balsamic reduction is made. Besides publicizing my work, I belong to two groups: my high school class group I founded to facilitate organizing a couple of reunions, and a group I started for our home owners association. These two useful functions are likely the reason I still have a Facebook account.

The gist of this is to cut way back on Instagram time, and not dally when I’m doing something purposefully. In theory, everything I do on social media should be purposeful. I’ll give that a week or so and see if my screen time is reduced. What I would much rather be doing is spending time face-to-face with my friends. Here’s an example:

I had a chance to spend an hour with a dear friend in a deserted cafe this week. We were bathed in sunlight, although I preferred a seat that was shaded. We talked about our books, our health, and our plans. It was an oasis of calm and warmth in the increasingly turbulent world in which we live. I need more time spent like that. Likely we all could use it.

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Living in Society

Best Reading in 2024

Trail walking at sunrise.

Like with so many other parts of my life, my reading was punk in 2024. I had to cut back on my goal to 52 books because I picked some long ones that weren’t that interesting. There were some real winners this year and a bit of ticket punching. Here is the best of the lot. I’m on Goodreads so you can find me here.

The best book I read was Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. I recommended it to others repeatedly, and would likely read it again once a bit more water goes under the bridge. The combination of discrimination against women in science, a single mother, a cooking show, and daring women who view her television program to change the status quo was irresistible. I don’t often read a book twice, but expect this will be an exception.

I read multiple books that attempt to write the history of our times and forecast our immediate future. The best of these was Ari Berman’s Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It. I’ve been following Berman since he emerged from his home in Fairfield, Iowa to become more prominent on the national stage. Few people have written about the Trump administration as he does in this book. It is worth reading just for that. Other books I would categorize with Berman include something lost, something gained by Hillary Clinton, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen, and Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade.

Important memoirs and biographies I read this year include On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci and The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. All told, I read ten books in the memoir/biography category in 2024. None of them was a dog.

I read a number of books from my “To Be Read” pile. Noteworthy are the ones that serve as historical artifacts: In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Mathiessen, Narrative of Sojourner Truth by herself, Starved Rock: A Chapter of Colonial History by Eaton G. Osman, Wakefield’s History of the Black Hawk War by John Allen Wakefield, and Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago by William F. Drannan. While the to be read pile is not as glamorous as getting new books, it is valid work to be done. These were all worth the work.

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie is a new book by what I would call a young person (She was born in 1993). Ritchie brings a new perspective to environmental and nuclear weapons issues that has been wanting in the current literature. To say the book was refreshing would be an understatement.

The Cooking of Provincial France by M.F.K. Fisher discussed the cuisine of French provinces and provides many traditional recipes from these regions. More than that, it made the case for cuisines that rise up from the geography of soil, water, terrain, and animal husbandry to create foodstuffs, and by association, people, distinct to a region. This stands in sharp contrast to homogenized food ingredients as are available in grocery stores, or whose seeds are planted locally even though the environment has not nurtured them as if they were native to the region. The lesson from this Time-Life book was unexpected: when people are tied to food produced in a specific, local region, they gain a resilience some in the United States find wanting in our food culture.

I also read from my close circle of friends and acquaintances. Thom Hartmann published The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class―and How to Rescue Our Future. Maureen McCue published Dancing in a Disabled World in October. I believe we have a duty to read books written by people we know. The conversations I have with Hartmann and McCue about their books inform my own writing.

The whole list of books I read this year is posted as a Reading Challenge on Goodreads. If you are on that platform, I hope you will follow me so I can follow back to see what you are reading.

Happy reading!

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Living in Society

Mass Deportations

Photo by enes u00e7imen on Pexels.com

The reason the president-elect’s plan to deport millions of immigrants will fail has little to do with his ability to strong-arm law enforcement, and potentially the U.S. military, into corralling people in large, fenced-in Texas prisons. He may be able to do that. Missing is that immigrants are a part of the fabric of American society in a way that promotes and values the individual nature of people. While Trump talks about mass deportations of millions of people, each of the targeted people will have a name, a face, and a presence in the community in which they find themselves. To treat them as a fungible commodity, thus dehumanizing them, goes against the American grain and Trump will encounter that. I believe this is a significant enough obstacle that whatever the plan is, it will fail.

Where will federal officers find all these undocumented immigrants? They may have some records, like those Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate is trying to obtain regarding non-citizens who registered to vote. Voter fraud is so rare that will not fill Texas stockades.

When children of immigrants attend public schools, they are visible. Will teachers turn them over to federal authorities? It’s an open question. I suppose they are counting on people to snitch on their neighbors. In my neighborhood, I suspect that fellow who flies the Gadsden flag near his Trump 2024 flag might serve as a MAGA snitch. I hope not, yet this sounds a bit like North Korea, actually. It is like the North Korea portrayed in Barbara Demick’s book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea where neighbors snitch on neighbors. Maybe that’s what Republicans want in the United States.

In his book, The Audacity of Hope, then Senator Barack Obama recounted the story of how in 2006, Senator Chuck Grassley and he worked together on immigration reform. According to Obama,

Under the leadership of Ted Kennedy and John McCain, the Senate crafted a compromise (immigration reform) bill with three major components. The bill provided much tougher border security and, through an amendment I wrote with Chuck Grassley, made it significantly more difficult for employers to hire workers illegally. The bill also recognized the difficulty of deporting twelve million undocumented immigrants and instead created a long, eleven-year process under which many of them could earn citizenship.

The reasonableness of this story makes it seem more like a fairy tale than actual behavior of U.S. Senators.

Locally, the story we hear in the community is more granular and personal. There is an increase in the number of immigrants from countries other than Mexico. Parts of Iowa, especially university centers are international communities. We find landlords rent to immigrants more often and schools enroll more immigrant children. People who work in social safety net organizations like free medical clinics, food banks and neighborhood centers see a large number of immigrant clients. Public Health workers in Northwest Iowa require some staff members to speak Spanish to work effectively with immigrant communities. An increasing number of churches are being founded by immigrants. These are some of the things we see. The point is we know these people as individuals with a personality and a life woven into ours.

Because of the way Trump framed mass deportations, people are running scared, and I don’t mean undocumented residents. If the expectation is that undocumented residents will be found harboring kilos of fentanyl, there will be disappointment, especially here in Iowa. Anyone who has read Methland by Nick Reding or Dream Land by Sam Quinones knows that’s not how illegal international drug trafficking works.

The problems caused by a flawed immigration system are many. Native born workers have seen a decline in standard of living. Businesses want access to inexpensive labor provided by immigrants. Undocumented workers compete with native born/naturalized workers on an uneven playing field for jobs. Guest workers and work visa programs replace permanent jobs with temporary jobs without benefits or the legal protections guaranteed to most U.S. workers. Undocumented immigrants are most likely to receive abuse and mistreatment in social situations and in housing and employment. There is a language barrier and skin color may be different. Non-Christian religious backgrounds result in discrimination and mistreatment. All of these are symptoms. So what can we do?

Whatever that is, I expect the Trump administration to pay it little attention. Remember, Trump was the person who begged Republican Senators to kill the long negotiated immigration reform bill because he wanted to use the issue to get elected. Well, Mr. Trump. When your program deteriorates into chaos, what then? We all know you aren’t concerned about immigration. Let’s hope some of the real people involved as targets in the proposed mass deportations get a lifeline from the rest of us.

Dekulakisation. A parade under the banners “We will liquidate the kulaks as a class” and “All to the struggle against the wreckers of agriculture”. Photo Credit: Wikipedia.